I was once told - “chefs are artists.”
A narration that became the catalyst of my work, and the perspective on what this industry can bring to this world.
The best stories are unscripted, tell them anyway.
“ There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”
-Chuck Palahniuk
Areas of Expertise
Baking & Pastry Arts
Applied Food Studies Recipe Development Menu Illustration
My name is Eunice Juniper Wong. I am an American-Born-Chinese, born in New York, raised in Hong Kong.
I am a 24 year-old Pastry Chef, Baker, Menu & Recipe Developer, F&B Consultant, Illustrator, Author. I am currently in the pursuits of completing a Bachelors in Professional Studies program at the Culinary Institute of America, majoring in Applied Food Studies with Baking & Pastry Arts. In particular, I am majoring in the multi-faceted inter-disciplinaries of food studies, history and culture, building sustainable food communities through understanding the intersectional relationships between human experiences and food. Hence, how it transcends overtime. While these roles carry honourable weight, great privilege and scholar, I am nevertheless, human first.
To begin with, my passion for food sprouted from my family background and ethnicity. Being raised in a traditional Asian family, food is our love language. In particularly, I was raised in a fisherman village, close-knit community called Tai O, Lantau Islands. The strong kinship between human existence and the earth, food and culture, community has always been instrumental in the furthering of this profession. In that sense, I am subliminally, protrusively humbled to have learnt to weather life’s unprecedented storms through the spiritual lens of food from an early age. Long before it was conceptualised, numerically proven through cognitive reasoning, statistics, logic, I have learnt in sonder experience that food is the mother of life and death. It is never pure sustenance, but metaphorically and legitimately, food is for the soul.
Before becoming a student at the CIA, being a self-taught baker has taught me the importance of assiduity, diligence, tenacity and humble demeaners- to transcend all the human stories we carry through what we do is an emblematic gift. The best of us is shared, people-based. It wasn't long until I discovered the artistry, precision and delicacy behind baking & pastry arts. The impelling science, the magnetizing authenticity, the provoking competence. At the core of it, coexistence and harmony amongst the nuanced spheres, frolicking sprawls of humanity.
In all the paths this journey will lead me on, I take the most pride in carrying these stories with me. I take the most pride, in living with great love and having it as the backbone to who I am before anything else. We are nothing without what has come before us. I owe it to years of hard work, but mostly, reminisce of all the lives that has transpired upon all that’s left in the grains of us. Holding space, for deeply beautiful things that prolifically, transcends through seasons on this earth, collective realms of bioliphic diligence our ancestral lands’ sowed seeds, entails.